Surprise: Bing is doing quite well

Microsoft published information on Bing on the company's Bing Ads account yesterday that show Bing's market share in some parts of the world.

According to the Bing Network market share graphic, Bing has a global market share of 9% of the search market.

If you break down the market share, you will notice that Bing is doing quite well in North America, and other English speaking countries.

Bing's market share according to Microsoft is 33% in the US, 26% in the UK, 17% in Canada, 19% in Hong Kong, 17% in Norway, and 19% in France.

The data comes from Comscore; Bing Network data includes Bing Search, as well as Yahoo Search operations powered by Bing, and Aool Search Network. The measurement period was March 2017, and included only searches on desktop systems.

Bing Network market share

While Bing is doing well in some regions of the word, mostly in English speaking ones, it is not doing so well in others.

If you look at continents, you will notice an overall market share of 3% in the Asia Pacific region, and a 5% market share in Latin America.

Microsoft did reveal the number of monthly searches as well in the graphic. The Bing Network gets over 12 Billion monthly searches according to Microsoft worldwide. Over 5 Billion of those come from the United States alone.

The Comscore figures are a bit higher than those by third-party tracking services such as Statcounter. Statcounter sees Bing at a market share of 2.96% in March 2017. If you add Yahoo Search to that, which had a market share of 2.2% in the same month, you get an accumulated market share of 5.16% worldwide.

Microsoft's Bing Search engine is doing well when it comes to revenue as well according to Steve Sirich, General Manager of Bing Ads. Bing is closing in on the $5 Billion per year revenue mark, and has seen more than 30% growth over the last year. The growth of Bing is fueled mostly by the growth of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system, as Bing is integrated in Windows Search and also the default search engine for both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer.

Closing Words

One reason why Bing is doing well in most English speaking regions and not so well in most non-English speaking regions is that Microsoft still seems to focus much of the development on the US version of Bing.

New features are usually introduced on Bing US first, and there is always a chance that they are not pushed to regional versions of Bing at all.

I can only speak for Bing's German search results; they are not great mostly.

Now You: What's your take on Bing?